kingkillerfandomcom-20200214-history
Talk:Sympathy/@comment-98.172.80.82-20140729093207/@comment-36033930-20180630114612
Spoliers*** below and also, forgive my typing, I didn't proof read this before posting. How about: Why don't sympathists draw heat from other people's bodies? Seems like one could be a pretty powerful assassin by simply being able to do a single binding: linking the targets body heat/blood as, what I call, a "thermal source link" with a stick. You could drain their body heat trying to light the stick on fire. The books never explain how this "thermal source link" works though. Think back to Kvothes duel against Fenton where he uses straw as his link to Fenton's candle and is allowed no heat source but his own body. Okay, so he links the straw to the candle wick, sure makes sense. Now he is trying to light his straw on fire to light the candle wick on fire. Which kind of makes no sense, why not skip the straw-to-wick link and just try to transfer energy to the wick? Don't say that won't work because otherwise all Kvothe is doing is trying to transfer energy to the straw to light it on fire so that the wick will also catch on fire since the wick and straw are linked. Anyway, lets assume there is some reason behind linking the wick to the straw, maybe for alar training purposes. So how does Kvothe actaully transfer heat from his blood to the straw? Does he link blood-to-straw? Sounds like a garbage link to me. For that matter, lets assume he had a ranging bonfire (think of Devi helping Kvother deal with Ambrose's momet of Kvothe); ranging bonfire linked to a piece of straw also seems pretty garbage, there is no similarity. How about when Ambrose cuts Kvothe's lute strink when he is earning his pipes at the Eolian. How would Ambrose use his blood's heat to do that? He would have to have a link to the lute string. Let give him the benefit of the doubt. Evil person he is, he carrys instrument bit with him to the Eolian in case he needs to use sympath to damage other people instruments who are better than him and impress his lady, whatever. He has a lute string. He links his lute string to Kvothe's. Then he takes a knife and begins sawing away at the lute string he brought. Alas the binding is not strong enough because Ambrose sucks or something. He needs more energy to get the blade to cut the string. He pulls from his body. BUT HOW? Does he link his blood to his muscle to allow him to push harder on the knife, converting thermal energy into chemical energy to fuel his muscle? Does this mean if you linked a fire to your muscles you could directly transfer that thermal energy into super human strength? Think to the bandit fight and the broken tree in the Wise Man's Fears. Kvothe uses the thermal energy in his blood to cut through a bow string he has linked to a bandit's bow string. What kind of binding allows you to transfer thermal energy from your blood into the strength to cut through something with a knife. This binding seems to be the white elephant in the room. There must exist some binding that allows a Sympathist to transfer stored thermal energy into force. Is this the 'Maxim of Variable Heat Transferred to Constant Motion' mentioned above? If we accept this as true, then any source of stored thermal energy (which can be anything, thats how freezers work, they extract out heat from already cold objects; anything that is hotter than 0 degree's Kelvin, aka -273.15 degrees Celcius, aka -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, technically has thermal energy stored) can be used to heat something; it will get colder and the other thing will get hotter. That being said, in real life that's not easy, it takes energy to move heat across the gradient as natural physics has discovered that heat flows from hot to cold, not the other way around. But this brings me back to my original point. This type of binding is not explained, but must exist for any instance of sympath where a heat source is required. Think of when Kvother burnt Master Hemme. He bound the doll to Hemme. He put the doll over the candle and nothing really happened. He bound the candle to the brazier and put the doll over the candle. Hemme got burned becuase the candle now had all the thermal energy of the brazier behind it. In this instance there is no secret binding of heat source to the object. The actual energy tansfer came from Kvothe positioning the momet over an adequate heat source; whether that be the brazier itself, the candle with a link to the brazier, a smaller fire, a red hot piece of iron, etc. So either there is a direct binding that allows thermal energy to do work (I mean work as the technicall definition from physics) or there is a flaw in the sympathy magic system. Or there is another unknown answer to this issue.